qualitative research 2008 tamboukou 283 92

ABSTRACT In this article I problematize sequence as a necessary conditionfor defining and making sense of narratives and argue that it is to theconsideration of process that the interest in narrative research shouldshift. Process as an organizing plane focuses not on what stories are buton what they do and how their meaning is ceaselessly deferred,breaching the narratological conventions of coherence and closure.Drawing on my work with Gwen John’s letters, I trace threemethodological movements in narrative analytics: a) creating an archiveof stories as multiplicities of meanings, b) following the emergence of thenarratable subject, and c) making narrative connections in the politicalproject of re-imagining the subject of feminism.

KEYWORDS: feminist imaginary, letters, multiplicities, narratable subject, nomadic narratives,process

What is narrative?One of the most frequently posed questions in the burgeoning field of narrativeresearch in the social sciences is the simple ontological one: ‘What is narrative?’.Drawing on the tradition of narratology, but also distancing themselves from itsstructuralist obsession, narrative theorists in the social sciences have attemptedto address this question and have indeed come up with a wide variety of answersand definitions.1 Despite the different angles that narratives have been looked atfrom, however, there seems to be a consensus as to the importance of the onto-logical question, which needs to be continuously raised and explored. I shallinterrogate this consensus around the primacy of the ontological question bytracing first its expressions and second its causes, or rather its conditions of pos-sibility. In this context, the ontological question is put in brackets, while newquestions emerge as more pertinent and in need of exploration: What does a nar-rative do? How does it express its causes? In what way is it a sign of its conditions?What are the possibilities of its becoming other?

In tracing conditions of possibility that have historically shaped conceptualunderstandings of what a narrative is, sequence emerges as a dominant

A R T I C L E 283

Re-imagining the narratable subject

DOI: 10.1177/1468794106093623

Qualitative ResearchCopyright © 2008SAGE Publications(Los Angeles,London, New Delhiand Singapore)vol. 8(3) 283–292

QR

M A R I A TA M B O U K O UUniversity of East London, UK

at Cairo University on October 9, 2015qrj.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://qrj.sagepub.com/

theme. Drawing on the sequential canon, social scientists in narrativeresearch have suggested that narratives should be understood as organizing asequence of events into a whole so that the significance of each event can beunderstood through its relation to that whole. The following definition isexemplary of this approach:

Narratives (stories) in the human sciences should be defined provisionally as dis-courses with a clear sequential order that connect events in a meaningful way fora definite audience and thus offer insights about the world and/or people’s experi-ences of it. (Hinchman and Hinchman, 1997, cited in Elliott, 2005: 3)

The triangle of sequence–meaning–representation creates a conceptual frame-work within which narrative research is being placed. This framework seems to beshaken, however, within the postmodern image of thought, where the sequentialcondition is interrogated, meaning is decentred and representation is problema-tized.2 In this light there has been a shift of interest from the ontology of what is tothe historical ontology (Foucault, 1986) of how it has emerged and been histori-cally constituted, further moving to the ontogenesis (Simondon, 1992) of how itworks, with what effects and what are its possibilities of becoming other. It is, Iargue, on this transitional ground from ontology to ontogenesis that the concep-tual triangle of sequence⎯meaning⎯representation should be interrogated andnarratives should be theorized as entities open to constant becomings, stories inbecoming. In this light, it is to the consideration of process, rather than sequence,that the interest in narrative research should shift.

Process as an organizing plane in narrative analytics derives from a concep-tion of time as simultaneity and duration, an immeasurable concept of timewhere past, present and future co-exist. In this light the attention to processbrings in heterogeneous space/time configurations and invites the virtual tofill in the gaps and ruptures that appear in the sequential delineation of theactual.3 Narratives are therefore taken as discursive events that express only alimited set of lines of thought interwoven around moments of being temporar-ily crystallized into narrative forms. These actualized narratives, however, cre-ate conditions of possibility for more stories to emerge. As Hannah Arendt haspoetically put it, ‘The world is full of stories … just waiting to be told’ (cited inCavarero, 2000: 143). Moreover, what is not actualized or expressed in a nar-rative form – the virtual, the silenced, the non-said – still inheres in what hasbeen said, expressed or articulated, creating within the narrative itself a depos-itory of forces that can take it elsewhere, divert it from its initial aim or mean-ing, create bifurcations, sudden and unexpected changes, discontinuities and ruptures in the sequential structure.

In focusing on process I will now turn to my ongoing research of writingfeminist genealogies to offer some trails of methodological movements in nar-rative analytics, particularly drawing on my work with Gwen John’s lettersand paintings. Analytics is taken here from a Foucauldian vocabulary, not as aclosed methodological framework, but as a project examining how

284 Qualitative Research 8(3)



power/knowledge relations and forces of desire are intertwined in the formand content of narratives. In writing a genealogy of the female self in art,however, I am going beyond Foucault’s configuration of the self as an effect ofpower relations interwoven with certain historical and cultural practices ortechnologies (Foucault, 1988). In following Deleuzo-Guattarian (1988) lines offlight I am considering the self as a threshold, a door, a becoming betweenmultiplicities, an effect of a dance between power and desire, nomadic and yetnarratable, as I will further argue.

Gwen John: a narratable subject

The life and work of the Welsh artist Gwen John has been narrated, examinedand interpreted from a variety of authors’ perspectives and disciplinary inter-ests and fields,4 offering a rich example of how lives are caught up in stories(Israel, 1999) and of how culturally embedded stories shape perceptions,meanings and understandings, producing the real and the subject herself. Inline with my discussion so far, my work with John’s letters is being taken as anevent in retracing some paths of narrative analytics.

One of the problems that I encountered while working with John’s lettersconcerned the clichés surrounding the ways her life and work have been readand interpreted. The discourse of the recluse who escaped the bohemian circlesof London and the tyranny of her brother Augustus’ extravagant personality,only to submit herself to a torturous life of unconditional love for Rodin, seemsto saturate or at least affect the stories about and around her life, then and now.As briefly summarized by Langdale (1987: 1) in the very first line of her mono-graph on John: ‘Sister of one flamboyant genius and lover of another, GwenJohn was herself a recluse who created in artistic isolation.’ Similarly John’spaintings of interiors and portraits of solitary women have been used as thevisual background for the discourse of the recluse.

In a parallel movement, John’s art has been discussed and appreciated inclose interrelationship with her letters: decontextualized extracts or even linesof her letters have literally been used as captions for her paintings and as start-ing and/or concluding points for exhibition catalogues. ‘Gwen John: AnInterior Life’ was indeed the title of a catalogue of an exhibition series drawingon an extract from John’s letters to Ursula Tyrwhitt: ‘I may never have any-thing to express, except this desire for a more interior life’ (NLW MS 21468D,ff.72b–73).5 This extract has become the master phrase, supposedly encom-passing all that John was and did.

In preparing my research with John’s two extended bodies of correspon-dence – her letters to her life-long friend and fellow student at the Slade,Ursula Tyrwhitt (National Library of Wales) and to Augustus Rodin, her loverand mentor for over a decade (Rodin Museum Archives) – I read all theseaccounts and immersed myself in the pleasure of viewing her paintings by

285Tamboukou: Re-imagining the narratable subject



visiting galleries and studying exhibition catalogues (Langdale and Jenkins,1985; Jenkins and Stephens, 2004) and other art publications on her work(Taubman, 1985; Langdale, 1987; Foster 1999).6 I was therefore able to cre-ate a rich archive of stories, paintings, letters and academic essays wherein Imapped my genealogical inquiries.

John’s letters vividly convey experiences of a young woman’s interrelation-ship with patriarchal relations, the tyranny of heterosexual love, the difficul-ties of becoming an artist and the paradoxes of inhabiting the urban spaces ofmodernity, moving in between the contested boundaries of the private and thepublic (Tamboukou, 2007). The letters are further rich in terms of the storiesthey recount and the narrative tropes they draw on to convey passion andmeaning. It is no surprise that Chitty’s (1987) biography has been written byliterally paraphrasing long extracts from John’s letters, which have beenreshuffled to create the sequentially ordered biographical life of the recluse.These letters have lent themselves to a variety of interpretations and uses froma wide range of authorial positions and intentions. Small and sometimeschopped extracts have been used to create larger meta-narratives around theconstitution of women artists’ spatiality or theoretical discussions around thepossibility of the flâneuse (Wolff, 1994).

Situated within this archive, I have worked with John’s letters as ‘fluent’narrative texts producing multiplicities and difference and creating intensefields of narrative forces (Gibson, 1996). In moving beyond representation,I have read them, not in terms of the patriarchal or heterosexual segmen-tarities that they often depict, but mostly in terms of their vectors, the linesof flight from these segmentarities, the forces they release, the explosionsthey allow to occur. Confronting the intensity of John’s pain as momentarilycrystallized when writing to Rodin that ‘I am nothing but a small piece ofsuffering and desire’ (MGJ, B.J5, undated), what I have followed from theselines is not the inscription of pain within an immobile patriarchal and het-erosexual segmentarity, but rather narrative traces of pre-individual singu-larities: John writing herself not as a subject, but as ‘a piece of suffering anddesire’.

Not having been attached to a subject, the force of this narrative momentcreates virtual conditions of possibilities for explosions to occur, lines of flightto be released that would deterritorialize John’s desire, her will to paint andultimately herself. These lines of flight have been traced and followed in differ-ent letters of John’s extensive correspondences. My work therefore reinforcesand confirms Liz Stanley’s (2004) argument that narrative sense emerges asan effect of the exploration and juxtaposition of wider collections of lettersand bodies of correspondences, what she has theorized as the epistolarium. Inmy work with John’s letters I have actually identified epistolaria, since her twoextended bodies of correspondence to Rodin and her life-long friend Tyrwhitthave created differentiated planes of consistency wherein nomadic lines of herepistolary narratives have been mapped.




By having access to John’s epistolaria, I had a sense of how Marie,7 themodel/lover/protégée who writes to Rodin that ‘I had desired to be a distin-guished artist; I wanted my part in the sun… But now I am in love, I don’tenvy being known’ (MGJ, B.J4/Spring 1906), is at the same time Gwen John,the artist who keeps painting, exhibiting, selling her pictures and writing toTyrwhitt about her excitement of getting feedback about her work: ‘I had aletter from Rothenstein – a letter of praise that took my breath away for sometime, so unlimited it was’ (NLW MS 21468D, ff.21, 29/5/1908).

Further working with John’s paintings alongside her letters has been an on-going experiment that keeps unsettling my textual innocence, despite the factthat I have for years tried to problematize texts and the ways lives and subjectsare entangled within them. It is beyond the limitations of this article to expandmore on methodological strategies of working in the interface of the visualand the textual and I have written elsewhere about this (Tamboukou, 2007).What I have found fascinating, however, in the textual/visual interface is thatit has created conditions of possibility for forceful encounters between theactual and the virtual and has created a space where process in narratives canbe further explored.

In working with stories as multiplicities, I am obviously not interested incapturing the truth about John’s life or even recovering her as a historical sub-ject. My task as a genealogist is to excavate layers of regimes of truth in the con-struction of stories around the life and work of women artists, revealing whatKali Israel (1999) has richly theorized as the complex interrelationshipbetween lives, names, images and stories.

Beyond this, however, what my work has brought forward is a sugges-tion for an analytics of becomings. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s phi-losophy, my project is about freeing thought from deterministicessentialisms and showing that what has been actualized in women’s livescannot close down possibilities of other ways of being or rather of becom-ing a woman. Indeed, the study of singularities, moments of being enfoldedwithin John’s epistolary and visual narratives, has shown that women’scondition is not so much defined by molar formations and their dialecticoppositions as by what has escaped them, not the molar socio-culturalentities – patriarchy, heterosexual love – but the molecular counter-for-mations, its lines of flight. As Deleuze and Guattari have put it: ‘There isalways something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organiza-tions, … things that are attributed to a “change in values”, the youth,women, the mad, etc.’ (1988: 216). This interest in singularities is atten-tive to the effects of differentiation and scrutinizes the heterogeneity,meshworks and flows of stories and subjects. My work with narratives istherefore placed within a feminist political project, albeit not that of recov-ering voices or subjects but of re-imagining the subject of feminism as anomadic narratable self, the second move in narrative analytics to which Iam now turning.




NarratabilityThe very act of narration is immanently political, relational and embodied, asCavarero following Arendt (1998) has forcefully shown. To the Arendtian viewthat human beings as unique existents live together and are constitutivelyexposed to each other through the bodily senses, Cavarero adds the narratabilityof the self. The self emerges as narratable in that it is constitutive of the verydesire of listening to her story being narrated. This desire is interwoven withwhat Cavarero (2000: 35) conceives as ‘the unreflective knowledge of my sense-of-self through [which] I know that I have a story and that I consist in this story’.Moreover, the narratable self is not reducible to the contents of the story eitheras ‘a construction of the text or the effect of the performative power of narra-tion’; in this light, narratability is not about intelligibility, but about familiaritywith the ‘spontaneous narrating structure of memory’ (Cavarero, 2000: 35,34). Narration is therefore a process at once ontological – constitutive of the selfas narratable – and political in the Arendtian sense – exposing the vulnerabilityof the self and its dependence on others from the very moment of her birth.

The unique existent in Cavarero’s philosophy therefore has nothing to dowith the universal subject of the dominant philosophical discourse. Althoughunique and unrepeatable, the narratable self emerges within collectivities andcarries the marks of multi-leveled differences. Embedded within the fluidity ofits social, cultural and political milieu, the narratable self is always provi-sional, intersectional and unfixed. It is not a unitary core self, but rather asystem of selves grappling with differences and taking up subject positions, notin a permanent way, but rather temporarily, as points of departure for nomadicbecomings (Braidotti, 2006). The stories of the narratable self can thus beseen as events, prisms refracting actual and virtual possibilities of becoming,and in this sense I have called her the nomadic narratable self.

Returning to John’s letters, the study of her epistolaria raises the force of herown narratability. Her letters are unbelievably rich in expressing the unreflectivesense of her self as having a story and her desire for this story to be told. AsCavarero (2000: 40) has pithily noted, autobiography and biography are boundtogether in the desire ‘for the unity of the self in a form of a story’. In this light,John’s letters to Ursula Tyrwhitt about her wild walking adventures in theFrench countryside create a backdrop for the nomadic narratable self to emergein recounting her experiences of walking all day, painting or singing in cafés fora meal and sleeping rough. What I want to stress, however, is that in readingthese long detailed letters my interest is not the truth of the recounted facts oreven John’s feelings. What I am following here instead is the force of her desirefor her stories to be written and maybe told and retold, ‘the laval flow of her sen-tences’ (Woolf, 2007: 50), the process of her narratable constitution.

John’s desire for narration would later be transferred to her letters to Rodin,writing to him almost every day, repeatedly rendering her daily routine intostories:




I did not sleep well tonight either and after having tried to draw, I finished myhousework, took my book and went out to the country … now I feel better since Ihave been out for a long walk in the country. It is strange how walking for longrelieves my heart! (MGJ, B.J4)

These letters cover a wide variety of themes: her immense love for him and theunbearable pain of their separation, financial difficulties and her loathing forhaving to work as a model, the struggles of finding a room in Paris and thepleasures of making it feel like home. There are long letters filled with dreams,detailed adventures of walking the Parisian streets, gardens and the sur-rounding countryside, long references to her cat, the anxiety of being a for-eigner in Paris and finally reflections upon life, art, nature, womanhood,gender relations and love.

While immersed in her daily correspondence with Rodin, John went on writ-ing letters to her friend Tyrwhitt until the end of her life. These letters were fewerbut forceful in expressing her desire of becoming an artist, a theme that wouldnever come up in her letters to Rodin. This was clearly and briefly put in a letterwritten on 4 February 1910: ‘As to me I cannot imagine why my vision will havesome value in the world – and yet I know it will’ (NLW MS 21468D, ff.39b).

John’s letters are certainly creating an assemblage, a narrative matrix(McQuillan, 2000: 10) for the narratable self to emerge. However, followingCavarero, John’s self is not reducible to the contents of her letters, their textualpractices and/or narrative tropes. What her letters do is to open up a field offorces for the question of who one is to be explored, and also for the researcherto become familiar with processes of her own narratability, and to immerseherself in the pleasures of working with narratives. This point brings me to thefinal move of the narrative analytics explored in this article.

Narrative connectionsNarration is always a relational experience, even if the recipient of the story isan imagined one. In this light, John’s desire for her story to be told has madeforceful connections with my own auto/biographical desire as a feministresearcher in what I have identified as the pleasures of doing narrativeresearch. Indeed, my work with John’s epistolary and visual narratives hasfacilitated leaps into women’s space/time blocks – past, present and future –heterogeneous and yet surprisingly contemporaneous. Reading her letters andlooking at her paintings, but also living and working in the places and spacesof her own actuality,8 has triggered the sense of my own narratability andfacilitated connections with her stories. These connections, however, have notbeen about identification with John as a historical subject. They werespace/time connections that made me realize that my own present as a femi-nist researcher is a system of actualized moments, surrounded by a multiplic-ity of virtualities emerging from my work with John’s and indeed other women’snarrative moments (past and present), opening up possibilities for life yet to be




actualized in a feminist future that is radical and open. Working with narrativescreates an assemblage of power relations, forces of desire and intense pleasuresfor narratable selves to make connections, sense their vulnerability and become exposed to their dependence on others. This is Arendt’s conceptualiza-tion of the political, which in my case has become the political (1998) project ofre-imagining the subject of feminism, my own sense of the feminist imaginary.

Tentative conclusionsIn this article I have problematized sequence as a central axis for making senseof narratives. I have developed the idea of nomadic narratives, stories thatneed not have definitive beginnings or ends but rather unfold in the intermezzoof a variety of literary genres and auto/biographical documents – letters in thecase of this article. In this light, the project of narrative analytics focuses onthe process of how narratives evolve as stories in becoming and meaningemerges in the flow of narratives rather than in their sequential structure.There is a shift of interest from how experience is represented to what emergesas an effect of power/knowledge relations and forces of desire at play, and theanalysis is finally attentive to the fluidity and openness of narratives, the vir-tual forces that surround them, the silences and the unsaid. In this context,Gwen John emerges as a narratable subject constitutive of her desire for herstories to be told but not reducible to the content of these stories. It is withinthis process of narratability that connections are being made between narrat-able selves that are ontologically and politically constituted as relational.

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

I would like to thank the Rodin Museum Archives for assisting me with thearchival research and giving me permission to quote from the letters. Thanksalso to Sara John for giving me permission for photocopies of Gwen John’s cor-respondence. Finally I would like to thank the editor and anonymous review-ers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

N O T E S

1. For a rich discussion about the different conceptualizations of narrative, seeMcQuillan (2000), particularly the introduction (pp. 1–33) and Part 3 on tax-onomies (pp. 309–45).

2. See McQuillan (2000), particularly the section on post-narratology, pp. 128–74,and Gibson (1996).

3. The conception of time as duration derives from Bergson’s philosophy wherein theconceptual pair of the virtual/actual is contrasted to that of the possible/real.While the possible/real pair is governed by the principles of resemblance and limi-tation, the virtual/actual opens up numberless possibilities of future becomings.See Grosz (2005) for a rich discussion of the actual and the virtual in Bergson’s andDeleuze’s thought, particularly Chapter 6 ‘Deleuze, Bergson and the virtual’.




4. See Chitty (1987); Taubman (1985); Langdale (1987); Wolff (1994); Foster(1999); Roe (2002); Lloyd-Morgan (2004).

5. Barbican, 1985; Manchester, 1985–1986; Yale, 1986.6. Quite incidentally the Tate Gallery held a retrospective exhibition on Gwen John

and Augustus John (September 2004–January 2005) which gave me the opportu-nity to see a wide range of her paintings.

7. John was signing her letters to Rodin as Marie, the French version of the middlepart of her full name: Gwendolen Mary John.

8. I refer here to the time I spent in Paris, working at the archives of the RodinMuseum (May–June 2005). I am indebted to the University of East London forfunding this visit.

A R C H I VA L S O U R C E S

National Library of Wales, Archives, Gwen John’s papers (NLW MS).Rodin Museum, Marie Gwendolen John’s boxes (MR/MGJ).

R E F E R E N C E S

Arendt, H. (1998[1958]) The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: The University of ChicagoPress.

Braidotti, R. (2006) Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press.Cavarero, A. (2000) Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. London: Routledge.Chitty, S. (1987) Gwen John. New York: Franklin Watts.Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

London: The Athlone Press.Elliott, J. (2005) Using Narrative in Social Research: Qualitative and Quantitative

Approaches. London: Sage.Foster, A. (1999) Gwen John. London: Tate Gallery Publishing.Foucault, M. (1986) ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader.

Harmondsworth: Peregrine.Foucault, M. (1988) ‘Technologies of the Self ’, in L. Martin, H. Gutman and P. Hutton

(eds) Technologies of the Self. London: Tavistock.Gibson, A. (1996) Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press.Grosz, E. (2005) Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham, NC, and London: Duke

University Press.Israel, K. (1999) Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.Jenkins, D.F. and Stephens, C. (2004) (eds) Gwen John and Augustus John. London: Tate

Gallery Publishing.Langdale, C. (1987) Gwen John, With a Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings and a Selection

of the Drawings. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press.Langdale, C. and Jenkins, D. (1985) Gwen John: An Interior Life. New York: Rizzoli.Lloyd-Morgan, C. (2004) Gwen John: Letters and Notebooks. London: Tate Publishing in

association with the National Library of Wales.McQuillan, M. (2000) (ed.) The Narrative Reader. London: Routledge.Roe, S. (2002) Gwen John, A Life. London: Vintage.Simondon, G. (1992) ‘The Genesis of the Individual’, in J. Crary and S. Kwinter (eds)

Incorporations: Zone 6. New York: Zone.




Stanley, L. (2004) ‘The Epistolarium: On Theorizing Letters and Correspondences’,Auto/Biography 12(3): 201–35.

Tamboukou, M. (2007) ‘Interior Styles/Extravagant Lives: Gendered Narratives ofSensi/able Spaces’, in E.H. Huijbens and Ó.P. Jónsson (eds) Sensi/able Spaces. Space,Art and the Environment. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.

Taubman, M. (1985) Gwen John: The Artist and her Work. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress.

Wolff, J. (1994) ‘The Artist and the Flâneur: Rodin, Rilke and Gwen John in Paris’, in K. Tester (ed.) The Flâneur, pp. 111–37. London: Routledge.

Woolf, V. (2007[1931]) The Waves. London: Hogarth Press.

MARIA TAMBOUKOU is Reader in Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre of NarrativeResearch, University of East London. Writing feminist genealogies is the main focus ofher research. She is the author of Women, Education, The Self: A Foucauldian Perspective(Palgrave, 2003). She currently works with women artists’ letters and paintings,exploring power/desire connections in the interface of visual and textual narratives.Address: Centre for Narrative Research, University of East London, 4–6 University Way,London E16 2RD, UK. [email: [email protected]]




qualitative research 2008 tamboukou 283 92

Documents